Hofmann cites a contemporary vignette by a much younger writer, Wolfgang Koeppen, of Döblin playing chess in a Berlin coffee house: “Pale face, pointy nose. The features above the stiff collar could have belonged to a clergyman. Jesuitical, which I propose as a positive here. Learned, finical, ascetic, disciplined. But the eyes behind the spectacles, which were oval, and I seem to remember, wire-rimmed, they were, tired, veiled, elsewhere, only half intent on the board and the figures. Alert, like a huntsman, but somehow passively so. It was clear that he wanted to win the game, and in time he did win it. But straightaway it became a matter of indifference to him. Perhaps he was observing himself, seeing into himself, thinking, what am I doing here, I should be in Babylon.” In fact, he was soon to go into exile.

Döblin’s achievement in Berlin Alexanderplatz was so colossal that it eclipsed the rest of his career. Hofmann’s rendering conveys something of the original, above all the filmic quality that made the novel the basis of an early talkie in 1931 and then a TV series by Fassbinder in 1980. But the book itself is a fascinating work of art. The first edition is an amalgam of tradition and modernism: Fischer’s typography uses the old-fashioned Gothic script; but the remarkable dustjacket, designed by Georg Salter, combines text and images, just as the novel does; it became the most plagiarised book cover in the history of German publishing.

Yet his celebrity, especially on the Left, doesn’t make Döblin a natural subject for Standpoint. What does is the moral framework, which is unmistakably Judaeo-Christian. (A secular Jew, in later life he converted to Catholicism.) At one point he introduces Job into the narrative, arguing with a voice that could be either God or Satan: Job is a Biblical Biberkopf. The novel is saturated in the search for transcendence and meaning. Like the greatest of Judaeo-Christian prayers, it begs God to forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and pleads with Him not to lead us into temptation. It is a parable that upholds freedom against fatalism and truth against relativism. That is what Western civilisation is all about.

Standpoint has always published fiction and poetry and this issue includes “The End of the Lazars”, a powerful short story by Joseph Epstein. The character of Elliott Lazar illustrates, quite differently from Franz Biberkopf, the case of a man whose decency deserves better than his predicament permits. Elliott defies the great and good on the Council of the National Endowment for the Arts by refusing to lower his standards. He won’t pretend that do-gooding schemes to provide “writers’ places” or “poetry in prisons” have anything to do with Western civilisation. He makes himself unpopular, but he “took no prisoners”.